Archival Data/Secondary Data Techniques

Archival data are data that already exist, such as survey responses, test scores, data saved from prior experiments, or other observations or texts. Another term for archival data is secondary data, which refers to data collected by someone else rather than by the primary researcher. Someone may use secondary data to reexamine data for the same purpose that was originally intended or to answer research questions that are unrelated to the purpose(s) for which the data were originally collected. Archival data are often used in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology in one of two ways: (1) as the focal source of data in a research investigation (e.g., survey data collected and made available as part of a public-use data set), or (2) as a supplement ...